Whitehead Colson - Sag Harbor

We drank some of our father's seven-ounce Miller bottles. I put ice on it and we watched the last half of The Paper Chase . I'd try again in the morning.

The next morning the swelling had gone down a little and the hole was scabbed over. I tried squeezing it again. The BB wasn't stuck in the tough flesh anymore, but now the “entry wound” was closed over. Our parents were coming out that night and they were going to murder us. Playing with BB guns. Allowing Reggie to play with BB guns when I was in charge of the house. Both of us letting the other play with BB guns when we should have known better. Three capital offenses right there.

I was going to have to get it out.

I had a scalpel from my eighth-grade science class, but it was in the city. Our father's razor blades were the disposable kind, encased in plastic to prevent exactly this kind of misuse. I sent Reggie out to Frederico's. “Get some of those old-fashioned razor blades, the ones people use to kill themselves.”

I stared at my stupid face. Some kids rebelled to get attention. I did stupid things very carefully, spending all of my time thinking of ways to engineer small stupid things without getting caught. Things so small that no one else could see them and only I knew about them. But there I was last night, being stupid in a group, and of course that broke my rules and look where it got me. Who holds a BB-gun war at twilight? The dumb and the desperate. I had that thought, What if I could go back in time? Just thirteen hours. A simple time machine was all I was asking, a leftover prop from a science-fiction movie. You had to have real powers to pull that off, George Lucas — type special effects. Take the case of my friend Greedo. In 1997 when George Lucas rereleased his Star Wars trilogy, he fixed what he didn't like using modern special-effects technology, erasing the mistakes of his youth. He had a secret compound and an entire nerd army dedicated to this purpose. In Greedo's case, that meant rewriting the alien's history. In the original movie, the green-skinned bounty hunter is going to deliver the reluctant hero Han Solo to the space-age Mafia don Jabba the Hut, so Han shoots him to prevent this. But all those years later, that version of Han Solo, the one who shoots first, didn't fit in with Lucas's idea of how a real hero acts. So he changed what happened. He re-digitized the scene, inserted a laser blast of Greedo shooting first so that Han didn't shoot someone in cold blood. Han was a hero, Greedo the villain. There. Fixed.

Fans were angry. People don't like it if you mess with their childhood. But not me. Greedo didn't change. There was the first Greedo, the one we knew, and the other Greedo, the new one that emerged to change the meaning of things. To me they're both real. It's a simple thing to keep the two Greedos together in your head if you know how.

Reggie returned with a pack of real razor blades, each one individually wrapped like cheese slices. I peeled the cardboard off one. God it looked terrible. It was such a slim piece of metal and yet host to so much more potentiality than the BB guns. And I was going to put it in my face. Reggie's lip was trembling. His eyes watered. He said, “I don't want anything to happen to you.”

Don't cry or you'll get some more. “I'll be okay.” I kicked him out.

I cut a thin line into the scab and I squeezed. The BB didn't move. I cut deeper into it. Nothing happened. So I cut another line, and now I had an X. I squeezed as hard as I could. The BB was too deep. The FPS had been such that it was down in there, and the skin had closed around it in an embrace. I wasn't so much of a psycho that I was really going to dig in there, shit.

We didn't know what we were going to do. Like the good old days when we broke a lamp or put a hole in the couch and ran around each other like crazy cockroaches. Two fuckups waiting for the Big Shoe. Eye patch? We prayed they'd decide at the last minute not to come out. The odds were good. (“Never tell me the odds,” was a Han Solo — ism, hero talk.) We cleaned the house extra special, even used Windex for the fingerprints on the fridge. Maybe that would distract them. We stuck the bloody mop of Bounty paper towels and a blood-soaked washcloth into a plastic King Kullen bag and shoved it way down in the garbage.

In the middle of the afternoon, Reggie went out to sell our gun to NP, who bought it for fifty cents on the dollar. We rehearsed cover stories and settled on, We were running through the woods to Clive's house and I ran into a branch that was sticking out! I coulda poked my eye out! That way they could scold us for running in the woods, and leave it at that. But they got home and never noticed. This big thing almost in my eye.

The BB guns didn't come out again that summer. We weren't the only ones to get rid of them. The thrill was gone, plus the girls finally appeared, like I said, contorting our Thursdays into a new sort of miserable. For some of us, those were our first guns, a rehearsal. I'd like to say, all these years later, now that one of us is dead and another paralyzed from the waist down from actual bullets — drug-related, as the papers put it — that the game wasn't so innocent after all. But it's not true. We always fought for real. Only the nature of the fight changed. It always will. As time went on, we learned to arm ourselves in our different ways. Some of us with real guns, some of us with more ephemeral weapons, an idea or improbable plan or some sort of formulation about how best to move through the world.

An idea that will let us be. Protect us and keep us safe. But a weapon nonetheless.

It's still there. Under the skin. It's good for a story, something to shock people with after I've known them for years and feel a need to surprise them with the other boy. It's not a scar that people notice even though it's right there. I asked a doctor about it once, about blood poisoning over time. He shook his head. Then he shrugged. “It hasn't killed you yet.”

WE WERE A COSBY FAMILY, GOOD ON PAPER. THATwas the lingo. Father a doctor, mother a lawyer. Three kids, prep-schooled, with clean fingernails and nice manners. No imperial brownstone, but our Prewar Classic 7 wasn't too shabby, squeezing us tight in old elegant bones. Did we squirm? Oh so quietly.

The Cosby Show was the Number-One Show in America, leadoff man of NBC's Thursday Night Dynasty. White people loved it, even the ones who took it as science fiction, some colored version of Time Tunnel or Lost in Space . Who are these people? We said: People we know. And we watched it. People we knew started wearing sweaters with mind-melting patterns, in tribute to the Coz Himself, and the barber shops buzzed up versions of Theo's latest haircut, whatever he and his friends sported on set, in their brief careers, those handsome boys who went nowhere. The young men marched out of barber shops to all coordinates with flattops, fades, hi-tops of Pisan ambition: Theo's army. “They're a real Cosby Family,” people said, when acquaintances broke the atmosphere to better orbit. A term of affection and admiration.

From the street, I'd been relieved to see that the bedrooms were dark. A long day at work, then suffering through Friday-evening LIE traffic — my parents were often asleep when I got off the late shift at Jonni Waffle. Then I reached the steps and heard the TV and saw the moths staggering in the light from the living-room windows. My father was awake. “Where's Shithead?” he asked as I closed the door.

“He's still at Burger King,” I said. We were a few months into When Dad Called Reggie Shithead for a Year. That spring, my brother brought home two C minuses on his report card, a new record. Reggie and freshman year were not buddies. He flunked test after test, the ones handed out by teachers and the more important ones, the ones given by other students. It was this latter brand of pop quiz that he really cared about, which is a pity because you can never prepare for them. Especially if you were kids like us. These other grades went down on your real Permanent Record, the one you carried on your person at all times even when high school was long over. Everyone saw the marks you got, as if they had X-ray eyes.